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Alarming extinction levels cause Earth's species to feel the squeeze
(Jonathan Amos, BBC News, May 21, 2005)
If we continue with current rates of species extinction, we will have no chance of rolling back poverty and the lives of all humans will be diminished. . . . That is the stark warning to come out of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), the most comprehensive audit of the health of our planet to date. . . . Organisms are disappearing at something like 100 to 1,000 times the "background levels" seen in the fossil record. . . . Scientists warn that removing so many species puts our own existence at risk. . . . It will certainly make it much harder to lift the world's poor out of hardship given that these people are often the most vulnerable to ecosystem degradation, the researchers say. . . . It is the latest in a series of detailed documents to come out of the MA, a remarkable tome drawn up by 1,300 researchers from 95 nations over four years. . . . The MA pulls together the current state of knowledge and in its latest release this week focuses specifically on biodiversity and the likely impacts its continued loss will have on human society. . . . A third of all amphibians, a fifth of mammals and an eighth of all birds are now threatened with extinction. It is thought 90% of the large predatory fish in the oceans have gone since the beginning of industrial trawling. . . . And these are just the vertebrates - the species we know most about. Ninety percent of species, maybe more, have not even been catalogued by science yet. . . . "Future models are very uncertain but all of them tell us that . . . And although we may be some distance away from an "end scenario", there is no doubt the rapid expansion of the human population and its high consumption of natural resources have taken a heavy toll on ecosystems and the organisms that inhabit them. . . . The distribution of species around the globe is becoming more homogenous, as invasive creatures hitch a ride on fast human transport and trade routes. . . . Genetic diversity, also, is declining rapidly. . . . This is most obvious in domesticated plants and animals where the pursuit of high yields and the pressures of global markets have pushed farmers towards a limited range of cultivars and breeds. . . . And so it is not simply that species are fewer in number, their changed circumstances may also have reduced their resilience and their ability to cope with future change.

posted by LoZo 6:18 AM

 

The Long Emergency: When Cheap Oil Runs Out
(James Howard Kunstler, RollingStone, March 24, 2005)
It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency. . . . Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it. . . . The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion. . . . The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted. . . . The United States passed its own oil peak -- about 11 million barrels a day -- in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen. . . . The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic power. Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s. . . . Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant levels in 2003 and 2004. . . . Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production. . . . It will change everything about how we live. . . . Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble. . . . We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions. . . . No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. . . . The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. . . . In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that "the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary." . . . Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability. . . . Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out. . . . The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class. . . . Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream. These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land. . . . The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous. . . . These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on.

posted by LoZo 4:58 PM